Professional Ethics and Primary Care Medicine: Beyond Dilemmas and Decorum - Paperback

by Harmon L. Smith (Author), Larry R. Churchill (Author)

This volume moves beyond ethics as problem-solving or ethics as etiquette to offer a look at ethics in primary care--as opposed to life-or-death--medical care. Professional Ethics and Primary Care Medicine deals with the ethics of routine, day-to-day encounters between doctors and patients. It probes beneath the hard decisions to look at the moral frameworks, habits of thought, and customs of practice that underlie choices. Harmon Smith and Larry Churchill argue that primary care, far from being merely a setting for the rendering of care, provides a new understanding of both physician and patient, and thereby offers a fresh basis for medical ethics.

Back Jacket

Smith and Churchill expand the horizons of medical ethics beyond quandary solving and unraveling the impact of biotechnology. They center instead on the heart of medical morals--the intersection of persons and of values in the healing relationship. Professional Ethics and Primary Care Medicine" engages the issues at the 'front line' in primary care medicine, and it does so with clarity, sensitivity, and eminent good sense. This is a book not to be missed by students, practitioners, and the general public."--Edmund D. Pellegrino